20 Halloween Scares to Put Fear Into Every Twitter Fan

18. Strains on the company's infrastructure thanks to a spike in users will lead the company to cut tweet lengths by half, to 70 characters.

17. By 2012, only the company's official clients can be used to update Twitter. Existing clients, such as Seesmic and TweetDeck, will be asked to migrate instead to Plurk and Identica.

16. The company's three founders, Ev, Biz and Jack, all have four or fewer letters in their first name. The new CEO is named Dick. This is the primary reason character limits make sense to these folks. Even their communications guy is named Sean, and goes by @SG. Thus, if you have a name like Demetrius or Annabelle, you should never expect to get a job at Twitter. In fact, you probably shouldn't even have an account.

15. Due to the popularity of retweeting, and the understanding that not everybody reads every tweet, Twitter will set up parallel domains called retwitter.com and reretwitter.com that syndicate the Twitter firehose, only delayed a few hours, so you can relive the past as if it were in real-time.

14. In 2011, you may see the fail whale in the Twitter office more than Ev Williams.

13. Due to office constraints resulting from rapid hiring, the company will settle on an agreement with Google and Facebook to rent out some of their empty cubes. The move is also a side bet, knowing half the employees won't have to relocate when the eventual buyout comes anyway.

12. Twitter is going to become so ubiquitous that your mom and all her sisters are going to join. That is seriously going to be annoying.

11. Twitter Lists are going to expand to include as many as 5,000 people. But that still won't be enough for Robert Scoble @scobleizer, who will hit the limit on day two and swear he spent 100 hours perfecting each one.

10. Twitter is going to acquire the country Eritrea, solely to request a top level domain of .er, and shorten its domain to twitt.er.

9. The FBI is reading your tweets. They're the only ones who ever click on your links.

8. Automated tweets from all those programs your friends use to say when they are watching TV, where their location is, what high score they got on whatever game, and if they signed up to start using some app will soon outnumber actual tweets pushed by hand.

7. Twitter's @Anywhere platform will be followed by a companion program called @Anytime. The combination means you can never sign off from Twitter. Even when you sleep.

6. As Chris Messina, who pioneered Hashtags, is now at Google, the company will make a move to prevent Twitter from using them, claiming intellectual property. This will surprise many, who had expected more of an "Open Web" move from Google. The removal of hashtags will make the world's trending topics actually readable again.

5. Derived from the company's HackWeek, Twitter will launch a World News aggregation site that uses tweets as the source, and takes target at both Google News and Yahoo! News.

4. This guy Nick Selvaggio, who has the handle @direct, actually sees all your direct messages.

3. After being lambasted for a male-centric blue version of the site, Twitter delivers a pink version with cutesy writing "for the ladies".